In Solidarity with the current California Prisoner Hunger Strike which resumed on July 8, 2013, Peoples' Action for Rights and Community and Redwood Curtain CopWatch invites you to visit the weekly informational demonstration on the Arcata Plaza, “5PM for the 5 Demands.”

Our “Solitary 101″ PowerPoint, developed for the recent Midwest Coalition for Human Rights conference on Solitary Confinement and Human Rights, is now available online. The 60-slide PowerPoint includes sections on the history of solitary confinement, solitary as it is practiced in the United States today, and the growing movement against solitary confinement.

We encourage educators and advocates to use, share, and customize the presentation according to their needs (for non-commercial purposes only, with proper attribution to Solitary Watch). No advance permission is necessary, although we will appreciate hearing about how you are using the presentation, as well as any suggestions for improvement.

In 1986 Ojore Lutalo, a black revolutionary in the Trenton State Prison — now the New Jersey State Prison — wrote to Bonnie Kerness’s American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) office in Newark. His letter described the extreme isolation and other brutalities in the prison’s Management Control Unit, which he called a “prison within a prison.”

“I could not believe what he was telling me” about the MCU, she says. She reacted by becoming “this lunatic white lady” calling New Jersey corrections officials about Lutalo.

Kerness immediately went to work trying to stop MCU guards from harassing prisoners by waking them at 1 a.m. to make them strip in front of snarling dogs leaping for their genitals — to arbitrarily have them switch cells. She got this practice stopped.

Lutalo’s letter also began to open her eyes to the torture of solitary confinement, which in the mid-1980s was just starting to spread across the country as a mass penological practice. Coordinator of the AFSC’s national Prison Watch Project, Kerness had worked on prison issues since the mid-1970s. Now she became an anti-solitary-confinement activist. In 2012, she has been one longer and more consistently than, possibly, anyone else.

We have the codification in law of indefinite detention without trial. When the current president signed the NDAA National Defense Authorization Act he signed a law that would allow for the arrest and indefinite detention of citizens without trial. http://www.aclu.org/blog/tag/ndaa

We have the Justice department conspiring with local government to deprive patients of their life saving medicine. The Hummingbird dispensary was driven out of business and the city still will not permit others to fill the need for cannabis based treatments in the community.

In what might be the most egregious affront the City of Eureka has hired Murl Harpham to be the police chief. The hiring is illegal. He is over 65 and has worked for EPD for more than 25 years. Both require his mandatory retirement. He is also When a local activist came to the council meeting to bring this criminal act by the city to the attention of the public she was censored on the public access broadcast and the city website.

Last summer, people held in the SHU - Security Housing Unit - at Pelican Bay State Prison declared a hunger strike to protest the cruel and inhumane conditions inside. The hunger strikespread to more than 7,000 people locked up in California prisons. People from all "sides" - blacks,whites, Asians, Surenos and Nortenos put all politics behind and came together to demand their human rights.

On this day, October 10, 2012, the men in the Security Housing Unit at Pelican Bay are againleading all of us. They have called for "an end to all hostilities" within our state's prisons and jails. After doing so much time, the men in the Pelican Bay SHU have realized that they are being recycled over and over through the same dead-end system. For all of us, there must be a cut off point - a time at which we stop participating in our own destruction.

As young people who have experienced bloodshed on the streets of Los Angeles, and the violence and humiliation within juvenile halls, Probation camps and Division of Juvenile Justice Youth Prisons, we are also calling for an end to the war between the youth.

Prisoners Begin Hunger Strike at Three Facilities In NC

On Monday July 16th 2012, prisoners at Central Prison in Raleigh, Bertie CI in Windsor, and Scotland CI in Laurinburg all began a coordinated hunger strike. The men have issued a series of demands revolving around food, healthcare, abuse by guards, and in particular for a return of prison law libraries, and are encouraging other prisoners to join in with their own actions and demands. They are also calling for the release of those on I-Con status and the abolition of separate control statuses. The prisoners have vowed not to eat until their demands are met. [see prisoners' demands below]

Correspondence with the prisoners has confirmed the strike at several facilities, and that at least at Central Prison over 100 prisoners began the strike on Monday. Prisoners have encouraged supporters to call or fax the administrations of these different facilities as well as Director Robert Lewis (see information below), to “march or protest in front of Central Prison and others,” “boycott all products being sold in these prisons,” and to “contact media outlets and let them know what we are doing.”

Risin' up from the gulags of the largest incarcerating system in the world and from its streets and workplaces! Amplify the voices of those behind the walls!

10 DEMANDS of Hunger Strikers & WAYS to SUPPORT BELOW

May 22nd, 45 prisoners at Red Onion State Prison in Virginia began a hunger strike to protest inhumane and torturous treatment and the warden’s refusal to resolve their grievances. We’re working to build exposure and a list of endorsers as fast as possible.

We’re also asking people to send short, personally written letters to everyone possible within the VA prison system to inform them of what’s going on. We have contact information for dozens of men detained in both Red Onion State Prison and Wallens Ridge State Prison. We’ll prioritize ROSP and WRSP and then branch out across the state. The Virginia Department of Corrections will try hard and fast to silence this and keep it from spreading, so we will have to act quickly.

Fellow human rights defenders,

Thank you to all those who have followed the inspiring lead of the Georgia prisoners responsible for the largest strike in U.S. history. Please visit this link (http://www.petitiononline.com/wagesnow/petition.html) to view the currentsigners of the Solidarity Statement, which is in essence a petition to thepeople of this country to take concrete actions to build this movement.

So many people have been committed to this for years already, and because of the bold and dignified stand taken in Georgia we have an opportunity buildon these efforts.

Illegal To Feed Homeless- Man Arrested 2009 [Video]

The "soup wars" continue... If you don't buy it, if you don't sell it- you're a criminal. And not everybody who eats free food is homeless. The State just wants to make sure people who are really hungry and don't have money, can't eat.

This is the third article in a series we're writing on Quality of Life ordinances, our contemporary version of the vagrancy laws that have been with us for centuries. In the South, they were used to force freed slaves back to the plantation. In the North, they were used to instill a Protestant work ethic in indigent whites. This compulsion to control labor and separate the "worthy" from the "unworthy" is deeply ingrained in our culture and institutions.

Support 150,000 Calls for CA Prisoners through FacebookInvite all your Facebook friends to the 150,000 Calls for Prisoners event page (click here).

[Only a few days after President Obama signed into law provisions for arbitary and capricious seizure and indefinite detention of US citizens--throwing out habeus corpus and other "Constitutional rights"--one of the most prominent and courageous opponents of such a repressive policy--the US' detention of Japanese American citizens during World War II--has died. --Frontlines ed.]

Six thousand six hundred California prisoners participated in a 3-week-long hunger strike in July, seeking relief from unjust and inhumane conditions. In the face of California Department of Corrections (CDC) officials failing to honor settlement negotiations, the hunger strike resumed on September 26th, with nearly 12,000 prisoners participating in thirteen of that state’s prisons.

It is a truism that oppression breeds resistance. Indeed, the U.S. Declaration of Independence enshrines the right and duty of the oppressed to resist their oppression.